MONTREAL - Don’t be fooled by the title. Michael Haneke’s profound new film Amour is far from your standard Hollywood romance. It is also a more nuanced, challenging and thought-provoking experience than that one word might lead you to believe.

And yet, it is perfectly chosen. True love goes beyond giddy first dates, fairy tales and happy endings. It becomes entangled in life; and life is messy.

Amour won Cannes’s coveted Palme d’Or in May (Haneke’ssecond time winning the award, though he has taken the fest’s Grand Prix andbest director prizes in the past), making it a clear favourite in the Oscarcategory of best foreign-language film, for which it was nominated on Thursday,alongside nominations for best picture, best director, best original screenplayand best actress.

It is the story of two old people, Georges and Anne, playedby Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. Both give incredibleperformances — which is a good thing, since we’re alone with them for most ofthe two-hour running time.

The film begins with a door being broken down by firefighters, who enter the apartment to discover a carefully decorated, malodorous corpse lying peacefully in bed.

It ends with Isabelle Huppert walking wistfully through the same, empty apartment. In between, Haneke unravels a couple of mysteries —– the mystery of what happens, but also of life, real life, messy life and, especially, unglamorous life in its final, most difficult stages.

The film’s second scene takes place in a concert hall, where Georges and Anne are among the crowd, and after which they go backstage to congratulate the pianist. There is a pleasant bus ride home, before Haneke settles in for the long haul.

The acclaimed Austrian director (The Piano Teacher, Caché, The White Ribbon) is no stranger to close quarters, or to tension. Fear appears in ominous spurts: the couple arrives home to discover its front door tampered with; a doorbell rings but nobody is there; later in the film, an errant pigeon finds its way into the apartment’s entrance hall.

These incidents end up being more atmospheric than central to the plot. The first two, especially, allude to the vulnerability of the elderly. Georges and Anne have a happy, cozy life. But as they chat over breakfast at the kitchen table, another foreboding sign appears.

Anne freezes, mid-conversation, leaving Georges to wonder what the heck is happening. He gets her a cold compress, but leaves the water running. Still not getting any reaction, he exits the room to prepare to go find help. All the while, the water continues to run.

It’s the kind of detail and scene that make Amour so deeply affecting — at once mundane and devastating. Anne’s lapse is not an isolated incident. As she slips further into illness, Haneke reaches cruising altitude with this mesmerizing, troublingly poetic depiction of two old souls putting up a valiant fight in the impassive face of fate.

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